Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image management apparatus and a management method.
Description of the Related Art
If movies shot by a monitoring camera are continuously recorded in a recording apparatus, the data amount of the movies recorded in the recording apparatus becomes enormous. To efficiently detect and to check abnormal circumstances from the enormous amount of recorded movies, some monitoring camera systems execute video analysis processing, and perform processing of assigning predetermined information to a movie. As a technique of assigning predetermined information to a movie, there are provided techniques described in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-112005 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,601.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-112005 describes an image recording apparatus that records, if a change occurs in continuous image data shot by a camera, the change level and changed portion as index information. To play back the recorded images, the image recording apparatus described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-112005 refers to the index information, and plays back only the changed portion. According to this technique, it is possible to readily check images shot by a camera.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,601 describes a movie monitoring system in which a movie transmission apparatus divides movie data into predetermined units, assigns associated metadata to each divided movie data, and transmits the movie data and metadata to a movie reception apparatus. According to this technique, it is possible to improve the efficiency of an accumulation process and a search process.
In the techniques of the above-described patent literatures, by assigning predetermined information, such as metadata, to image data or movie data to be recorded, succeeding detection and checking processes are efficiently executed. In either of the patent literatures, however, the amount of information assigned to image data or movie data of a long time becomes enormous, and thus, the load of a search process cannot be sufficiently reduced.